Oracle Blog

Blog for designatsun

Of Design and Data

I turned on google analytics for the blog and
will intermittently share the data here.

I turned it on right before Loren's last post
and right away we had 80 or so hits from some of the predictable places. This tells me that most of us probably
have the RSS feed turned on and when
we learn that something new is up on the
blog - we go check it out.

The average visit length is 2.3 minutes. This is
good news. People are either reading
the blog entries, or there are staring
in stupification at the theme :).

Speaking of themes - if you all are like
me (and in this respect I think you are :))
- as soon as you see a new theme , you
want to tweak it. So, here is how to do this:

You are now ready to start tweaking. Send me the results and I will upload them! Don't want to mess with the css - thats fine - send me hex values for colors, mockups, new icons - whatever! Add your notes as comments to this blog (we can test drive the bug-tracker use case for the blog :)). We will share what you send on the blog itself, and find a way to get it into the css template if possible.

How is visit length calculated? If 'visit length' is the time between when a visitor accesses the first page of their visit and when they access the last page or move away from the blog or site, then could it be misleading? I could keep my browser window open for a couple of hours before I come back to click on another link on the blog. Does that make my visit length 2 hours?

I played with the reports some more and here is what I now think is happening.
Of the people who read the blog, 30% click on the design@sun link. I suspect this is because of the new theme and people wanting to see if it was a link. So these are the people whose visit times are kicking up the avg. So the correct conclusion is - the people who click on the title are leaving the page up for a few mins before clicking on the title :).

It was really interesting playing with the report and I might post a recording of it on the blog sometime.

I now know that Jano (only one in slovakia ??) is reading the blog :))

You might want to take a look at Avinash Kaushik's blog (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/) which recently discussed the way that the google analytics metrics are calculated. He also has a well-regarded book on the subject. He's the web analytics evangelist at Google.